Reading their entire analysis takes quite a bit of time, although it is entertaining. Here are some high points:

“This is a pretty standard imperial tactic for dealing with rebellion,” one of the analysts wrote, noting that the Romans occasionally wiped out a rebellious city to send a message to other potential troublemakers. “Kind of like a mastectomy. You lose one productive part of the body in order to keep cancer from spreading.”
And it worked. That’s why the rebels were forced to camp out on icy Hoth, with its snow monsters, at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back.”

And the Empire had a whole lot of planets anyway, so the loss of one wouldn’t make much difference. That’s particularly true for doomed Alderaan, which appeared to consume more than it produced.

Moving on: “One of the more effective negotiation tactics, from a game theory perspective, is to convince your opponent that you’re crazy enough to do something stupid.” The emperor sure did that.

The Death Star was such an effective deterrent, in fact, that it allowed the emperor to do away with the Imperial Senate once and for all.

But only for a while. Eventually, the storm troopers got more and more useless, the rebels got more ships and Ewoks, and the emperor’s right-hand man killed him.

In any case, if that hadn’t happened, hyperinflation would have done in the empire sooner or later.

My take? It all makes about as much sense as an elected teenage queen and hiding Darth Vader’s son on his home planet with his relatives under the name Luke Skywalker.

And, as a colleague here pointed out, it was really just a vanity project anyway, like Experience Music Project.